“Hey, don’t you listen? Our mothers are friends. Though, personally, my mom would love it. She keeps giving me this shit about her beautiful skin. Druff, I don’t know how we ever got born at all. To hear my mother tell it, you’d think clear skin was a secondary sex characteristic.”
And, really, you didn’t notice it, and after he met her the notion of her invisible physical deformity was vaguely exciting. It was a mild scoliosis, the slight curvature of her spine lifting her left hip and thrusting it faintly forward, providing a small shelf where she characteristically rested the palm of her hand and lending her the somewhat hard look of a dance hall girl in westerns. (“Miss Kitty,” he would call her later.)
But on the Sadie Hawkins Day in question they almost missed each other. He looked for a girl with a deformity. He looked for a girl with clear skin. And, though he found no cripples, two or three clear-skinned girls actually agreed to dance with him when he went up to them. He said his name, they told him theirs. Then he bowed out. (Jesus, Druff thought, do you see what I mean? I was this shit-scared guilt avoider! They could have sainted me, for Christ’s sake! Because it was only the knowledge that somewhere in that bunting’d, made-over gymnasium there must have been this shy, suffering Rose Helen lurching around looking for me that spooked me. Not just that her ma knew the ma of my friend, not even that my friend’s ma could connect me to the scene of my friend’s ma’s friend’s daughter’s shameful stand-up, but that I made the connection, I did, that these particular two or three clear- skinned girls were not that particular clear-skinned girl, and how would I feel if I were a crip and told, urged, Come on, Sadie Hawkins Day falls on a weekend this year, you can sleep in Saturday, come on, whaddaya say, how about it, come on, we have a mutual friend, and then get caught dancing with two or three girls who weren’t even deformed? No thank you. Thanks, but no thanks. Jesus, he thought, I was, I was — this Mikey!)
And found her, of course, where he should have looked first, along that wall of wallflowers, which isn’t always a wall, or even a partially occupied row of chairs, but often as not just an area, some dead space in the room which, occupied or not, busy or not, is something set aside, set off, a kind of sanctuary, as necessary to the practice of civilized life as flatware or toilets. Asking as soon as he saw her, “Are you Rose Helen Magnesson?”
“Yes, I am. Are you Robert Druff?”
“Yes. Happy Sadie Hawkins Day. Would you care to dance?”
Dancing wasn’t his specialty, even a simple box step, though now he thought that if it had only been a few years later, when people first began to dance to rhythm and blues, it might have been a different story. He could have handled the fast stuff, accommodated the large motor movements of funk. It was going in close that clumsied him, moved him, that is, toward unearned intimacy, pulled him, he meant, toward love. Dancing with Rose Helen that evening, moving his hand to rest casually on her left hip when she suddenly started, bolted, pushed it away, as if he’d grabbed her haunch.
Assuming he’d found it, accidentally touched her invisible deformity, whatever secreted, hidden-away thing it was (running on instinct here, believing, without knowing he held such beliefs, in some compensatory system of synergistics, of absolute justice, the up side of eye-for-eye) that, wounding her in one place, fixed her in another, cleared her skin, say — it was beautiful, remarkable, radiant in fact, incandescent, burning with the pearly collagens, moisturizers and organic steams, the mossy herbals and chemical brews of flush, full pores, all the natural cosmetics of, at once, a shining virginity and devastating pregnancy — and transfigured self-consciousness into a sort of shy, suffering charm.
Druff blurting, “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“No,” she said, “I’m not a good dance partner. I think I’d like to sit down now.”
“Oh sure,” he said, “but I’m the one who’s the lousy dancer. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Rose Helen said, “I’m not hurt. My dancing’s okay, I’m not a good partner.”
They were having coffee in the Union Building. Rose Helen guessed their friend had told Druff all about her. “All there is to tell,” she said. “I’m not a good partner,” she said, “because, well, I don’t like it when a boy touches me there.”
“I wasn’t trying anything. I mean all he said was it was some hip thing, that it isn’t even noticeable. It really isn’t.”
“I’m sitting down.”
“I didn’t see anything when you weren’t.”
“A full skirt covers a multitude of sins.”
He thought it a wonderful sentence. He believed she was clever. The synergistics again, the very thing which had driven her underground and caused her shyness, had given her wit. He actually laughed out loud.
“Look, I’m sorry if I loused up your Sadie Hawkins, okay?” Then she laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“Well, look at me. Sadie Hawkins! I mean did you pick the right girl for Sadie Hawkins, or what? I guess I’m just not the Sadie Hawkins Day type.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I mean I’m too nervous to dance, aren’t I?” She looked at him. “I’m two years older than you, you know.” Sure, he thought, his deformity. Their friend was a good reporter. He’d spilled the beans about both their deformities. (Druff as self-conscious about his age as Rose Helen about that raised left hip.)
They discussed their majors. Rose Helen said she enjoyed being around kids and thought she would become a teacher, possibly declare a minor in English since, counting this semester, she would already have six hours of credit in that subject. Druff confessed he was still undecided, that he hadn’t realized until this year how important it was to have a plan since you’d probably be stuck for life with whatever you chose, adding that it wasn’t fair to expect someone only nineteen or twenty — not, he amended in deference to that two-year difference in their ages, that being nineteen or twenty was anything of a handicap (that was the word he used, ”handicap“) — to lock in on what he wanted to be doing fifteen or so years later. It was a serious business, and sad, really, when you thought about it, that you had to start your life off on the right foot or otherwise you could wake up when you were thirty-five and find out that you weren’t where you thought you belonged. Because how many times were you alive? Once, right? He thought, he said, that to waste your life was the worst thing you could do with it. It was like self-murder, suicide.
“This is very depressing,” Rose Helen said.
“Well, it is,” Druff said. “That’s why I don’t think that just because someone has six hours of credit in a subject that’s a good enough reason to say, ‘Yes, I have six hours of credit in this subject, I might as well make it my minor.’ You have to be interested in it for its own sake.” (You tell her, Mikey, thought Druff inside a judgmental parenthesis.)
“Yes, but did it ever occur to you that the reason a party already has six hours in a particular subject just might be that the person is already interested in it?”
Then she said she thought he was being pretty sarcastic for someone who didn’t seem to know what he was going to do with his life and talked about self-murder a few years down the line. And now Druff remembered exactly what an attractive, tragic, brooding figure she had made him feel at the time, recalling, who hadn’t forgotten so much after all, though they were seated inside the Union Building—“La Mer” on the jukebox was playing — how he had had this vagrant image of himself, how he must have looked in her eyes — this windblown, tempest- tossed guy, collar turned up against the elements, cigarette smoke rolling like fog up the side — it wasn’t that many years since the war had ended — of his doomed resistance-fighter’s sharp features.